Thanks, Danny, but that's the only image offered (it says image 1/1 - and the arrows, "choosse thumbnail" don't work).
Any other ideas?
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Thanks, Danny, but that's the only image offered (it says image 1/1 - and the arrows, "choosse thumbnail" don't work).
Any other ideas?
Hi, All!
I've spent about an hour working on this with no success, so I thought I would ask the community:
How do you tell Facebook which image to put in for the thumbnail on a link you're posting? And I would like it to be a different image for each post, and I don't want to have to deal with programming PHP (the main solutions I saw).
I'm on a Wordpress based site, and I've tried putting images in as the featured image, made sure they weren't huge (under 200x200), made sure they were .jpeg... and the only thing that Facebook offers me as a thumbnail is a generic "green globe" image that I don't believe comes from my site at all.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance!
Use this as a model: http://www.google.com/search?q=your+search+query&pws=0&gl=US (obviously put your search query in where it says your+search+query (separated by plus signs)).
Broken down:
www.google.com - the search engine you want
pws=0 - remove any personalization
gl=US - return results as if you were in the US
If you want an easy way to do this, get the Google Global add-on for Firefox or Chrome. Then you do your search in whatever Google you happen to be in, and right-click on the SERPs (if in Firefox) or click on the icon on your extensions area (if in Chrome), and select which country. You may have to check the settings to make sure the no personalization is the default.
I've had some issues recently where sometimes it replaces my search query with an "f" in the query parameter, but in that case you can just type in your query (separated by plus signs) into the browser bar.
Good luck!
That's a good idea. It's strange, though, that it would have crawled almost all the other links on the site, but not this one, which is the one linked to most conspicuously from the home page.
Question just about said it all: I've seen a number of pages on sites that have a PA of 1 (with the metrics being 0 links from 0 root domains) when I can see on the site that it is linked to internally - from the main nav (which is CSS, not Javascript) and also from the footer, if not other places. Why would this be?
Update: upon looking further at the site, it appears that there's some kind of redirect going on, where the page linked to from the nav actually redirects to the real page. Would that eliminate PA, even if it's a 301? And additionally, is whatever is causing this lack of PA a reflection of how Google would relate to the page?
Thanks,
Aviva
Thanks, Andy. Can you explain why exactly you wouldn't endorse it and you would recommend removing the links? That's my feeling also, but I wanted some definitive reasoning before I do anything.
Thanks,
Aviva
Hi, All!
We have a new potential client, that when looking at his site with a tool, we noticed that the previous SEO company they worked with filled the homepage copy with lots of keyword-rich anchor text links pointing to different pages on the site - many links going to the same page, just with different keywords. These links are not indistinguishable in format from the other text, which is why we only noticed it with a tool.
I certainly wouldn't recommend doing that to start with, but once all these links are there, would you recommend taking them down? Is there any conceivable chance it could help the site? Is there a significant reason to think it will harm the site? Or will it just be pretty neutral?
In all that's been written (much by SEOMoz) about only the first link's anchor text counting, do subsequent links work like a no-follow in the sense that they are a waste of the link-juice of the page, or is it as if they aren't there at all? (And is "only the first link counts" still the most widely held theory, or have there been new developments since?)
Thanks, All!
Hi Dylan,
Thanks - that was very helpful. I sent the link off to the site webmaster, so hopefully that will be taken care of.
Thanks, Dylan. That's something to bear in mind if the client would be interested. But back to the original question: is this because store.example.com is a different subdomain? If it were example.com/store - would we be having this issue?
Thanks!
Hi!
One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com. When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com. Is this because of the subdomain issue?
How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain?
Thanks!
Thank you so much!
This was definitely helpful - especially the post from Distilled highlighting the practical use of the metric in analysis. I'm not sure this will be the most helpful metric, though, when deciding what pages would be the most valuable to optimize, because the number is an average. The Distilled post did mention filtering pages that had a lower number of pageviews, so that might compensate, but still you might end up choosing pages that have a higher $index but far less pageviews, meaning their overall contribution to revenue is less.
Is the implication of the goals metric that I mentioned above the number of goals the page contributed towards without averaging (kind of like the beginning of the $index metric, just counting "1 goal" instead of "x dollars" and not divided by pageviews)? Or is it with averaging?
Do you have an idea about the second question mentioned above - why the actual goal or funnel pages show less goal completions than there were actual goals?
Thanks!
Many websites - especially those done in foreign countries by non-native English speakers - have many grammatical and idiomatic errors in the English copy. How important is that to conversions (actually convincing the customer to buy, etc.) Is the poor English a turn-off, a cause for distrust or discomfort - or do people not care?
I'd be interested to hear people's personal opinions (the more the merrier) and if anyone has a more global perspective backed by research, testing, etc - that would be great,
Thanks in advance!
Hi, All!
I would like to create a custom report that will enable me to see which of my pages are contributing to goal completion on my site (so I can then optimize the pages that are contributing the most, with maximal ROI for the optimization investment). If I make the dimension "page/page title" and the metric "goal X completions" - which would make sense - what exactly are the numbers that I am seeing telling me? Is it how many times a person started the goal funnel from that pages (meaning every goal would appear only once and there be no overlap)? That doesn't appear to be the case with the numbers, because the headline in the main "Goals" section tells me I have 30 goal completions for that goal, for example, but the headline in the custom report (which is adding up all the numbers) is, say, 100. Or does it mean the number of times that this page was ever in the navigation path of someone who ended up completing a goal? Then the same goal would be counted multiple times, for each page in the path.
Additionally, I see this strange thing on some of my reports where the actual funnel pages appear as contributing towards goals, which I guess makes sense, but again the numbers don't match up. If the goal was to get to page B, and the funnel was A->B, and there were supposedly 30 goal completions, my custom report says that A gave 28 goal completions and B gave 25.
Anyone know for sure - or through testing - what the case is with all these things? Any explanations will be much appreciated!
Hi Justin,
Thanks for the reply (and the link, of course!) - must have missed that whiteboard friday video.....
OK, so my interpretation of that is that if the additional letters change the word enough, it probably won't rank for the basic word. If the changes are reasonably simple (like singular/plural) then I guess that Google can work that out. Also (although not mentioned in the video), if you have a word made up of a couple of real words, like bluewidget.com, it seems that Google can work out which word is which.
Would you agree?
I'd just like to clarify - in Hebrew, the additional "words" are actually additional letters added to the beginning or end (or both) of the keyword.
It's as if in English you would write "when you (masculine singular) want" as "whenyoumswant", i.e. in a single word. Do you think that Google would be able to work out which words were really part of whenyoumswant?
Hi, All!
This is for any foreign language SEOs where articles or prepostitions such as "the" "to" "in" or anything else are actually part of the word they are modifying and not a separate word, as in English:
How does Google understand those words on-page and in anchor text? If you want to optimize for the word "house", and your content/anchor text says "the house" or "in the house" (again, all one word) - what does Google count that as? Does it count toward "house"? Does it count toward "in the house" only? Does it count toward "house" but not as much as if you had just put "house"?
I end up sometimes writing slightly grammatically-off content because I want to optimize for the keyphrase - but is that necessary?
Obviously different languages might be different, but you can probably project a little from one to the others.
Thanks in advance!
This isn't really an answer to the question - in fact, it's something I've wondered about myself and I'd be happy to hear if people have anything to say on it that's backed up by research (probably wouldn't be too hard to design a test for anyone who's interested: take two new sites or new, identical pages on one site: promote one with KW1, KW2 only anchor text (gibberish words) and one with identical amounts of links (and from the same places) but some KW1, KW2 and some KW!, KW2, KW3 text, and see which one ranks first. Admittedly this isn't water-tight, especially considering one has to rank first, and even if the difference is reallt minute, with nothing else to go on Google might choose exact match.
On the other hand, we might see (and even if we don't see it in such a small test, it might be true) that Google would actually prefer to see variation - especially if you're talking about large numbers of links, it will make the link profile look more natural.
Maybe if I have the chance I'll run the test myself, but that might take a while to get around to it...
Good luck!
Hi! First of all, good luck on your linkbuilding efforts - it's not an easy job.
To answer your second question first, blogging can help with linkbuilding in the following ways:
if you write on your own blog with quality content (the more helpful and/or thought-provoking it is the better), readers may link to your post from their own sites or blogs
if you guest post on someone else's blog, you will often get backlinks to your site - sometimes within the post, from good anchor text, and sometimes from the author bio at the end
commenting on blogs can also help - if you comment often (and wisely) on a blog in your niche, you may develop a reputation that will lead the blog owner and readers back to your blog to see what you have to say. Make sure that the name you use to write the comment is linked to your blog or site, so they can get back there if they want to. You can also (on rare occasion), drop a link to your site if it would be perceived as helpful.
if that comment name has your keywords, that can also provide links to your site - but considering most blogs are no-follow, that opens up the great debate about the value of no-follow links, which is a little broader than should be addressed in this question. And with search engines focusing more on the context of links instead of just the anchor text, it's worth assuming that in a short time - if not already - keyword rich blog comment names are not going to be driving so much value, so you can put in a little effort there, but the main idea is to use those comments to drive a following that will want to come to your site, see what you have to say, be impressed, and link to it of their own accord.
The first question - "What is the best procedure for link building?" has a much longer answer, and there are plenty of guides put out by the big SEO names on the web to help. SEOMoz has one of their own: just put "link building guide" into that search box at the top of the screen and you'll get a good number of guided resources.
We're actually working on our own linkbuilding guide at our site - kind of a step-by-step practical compilation of all the ideas that we've seen in blog posts etc. over the two or so years. Hopefully it'll be ready in about a week or so and I can come and post the link to it then.
Update: here's the promised link building guide. Take a look and see if it helps.
One hint, though - if you go on Delicious and search for "linkbuilding" tagged pages, and see which pages were tagged the most times, that can give you an idea as to what resources people thought were most valuable as ideas for linkbuilding.
Good luck again,
Aviva B